Fluid-solid transition in hard hypersphere systems

In this work we present a numerical study, based on molecular dynamics simulations, to estimate the freezing point of hard spheres and hypersphere systems in dimension D = 4, 5, 6, and 7. We have studied the changes of the radial distribution function (RDF) as a function of density in the coexistence region. We started our simulations from crystalline states with densities above the melting point, and moved down to densities in the liquid state below the freezing point. For all the examined dimensions (including D = 3), it was observed that the height of the first minimum of the RDF changes in an almost continuous way around the freezing density and resembles a second order phase transition. With these results we propose a numerical method to estimate the freezing point as a function of the dimension D using numerical fits and semiempirical approaches. We find that the estimated values of the freezing point are very close to the previously reported values from simulations and theoretical approaches up to D = 6, reinforcing the validity of the proposed method. This was also applied to numerical simulations for D = 7 giving new estimations of the freezing point for this dimensionality. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3530780]